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Everything posted by joigus

No. Here you got me wrong. I think the illusion of free will (please, be aware I have no problem saying "the illusion of temperature" or "the illusion of entropy") is an emergent property.
I was more going along the lines of what I've heard some anti-reductionists say. Namely: electrons or protons are ideas or theories, not real things. So electrons and protons really are "born" in your mind. Therefore (they say) neither gives rise to the other.
I've been called a naive realist. But the person who called me that got called "simplistic idealist" by me. Idealists and anti-reductionists are not the only ones who can claim the right to hang an adjective on those they disagree with.
Neither am I naive nor are you shallow.
You probably are. Aren't we all?

Aha, right. That totally adds up in my mind.
So ignoring the QCD factor, which I wouldn't be able to calculate anyway, for an estimation of electrostatic attraction between proton and electron, we can use the inverse Bohr's radius, which proportional to the mass of the electron. That would give an estimation of chemical energy released in hydrogen reduction.
For an estimation of electrostatic repulsion between proton pairs (which is the order of energy released when the nucleus undergoes fission,) you can assume the energy proportional to the mass of the proton. The reason being that the reduced mass of the p-p system is mp/2 while the reduced mass of the p-e system is me. I'm being very schematic here, because p-p is not an EM bound state. So the solutions will not be the same, but they will scale the same. That would give,
\[\frac{E_{pp}}{E_{pe}}\sim\frac{r_{pe}}{r_{pp}}\sim\frac{m_{p}}{m_{e}}\sim2000\]
A rough estimation does give you order of 1000 times more energy released. And then there would be corrections due to breaking QCD bonds that you're referring to. The rough way to picture it for me would be a rubber sheet that gets very loose when the protons get closer together, but pulls very hard when they pull apart. Until they break. But having to break the gluon bond would subtract from electrostatic energy stored. The higher order term would have no dependence on either alpha_EM or alpha_QCD coupling constants, but the other would carry a QCD-coupling dependence for sure.
I think the mp/me does appear as the dominant factor, but the argument was missing. As you suggested, it's not a coincidence. I think it's a consequence of separating the leading term, which is electrostatic in nature.
Thanks a lot, @swansont, and corrections most welcome.
I agree, @MigL.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got me there. I was just thinking about re-editing that bit.
Edit1. On the other hand, the average ratio in interactions is of the order 102, so it really is:
\[\alpha_{\textrm{QCD}}/\alpha_{\textrm{EM}}\sim100\]
Masses don't play a part, AFAI can see. Thank you.
Edit2. On second thought. Energy released in fission what really is is stored electrostatic energy from proximity of the protons. So the estimation is different and is not governed by,
\[\alpha_{\textrm{QCD}}/\alpha_{\textrm{EM}}\sim100\]
100 times stronger seems to me peculiarly small. What do you think, @swansont?

I loved this example from:
If you don't mind, I would like to add it to my toolkit as a wonderful illustration of emergence. The problem for me is that I tend to see in emergence a fundamental asymmetry between the explanatory elements and the explained ones. That cannot be reversed: You cannot use pressure or temperature to derive positions and momenta of the particles. You cannot use your A to B wave to explain the behaviour of cars going B to A; but you can use cars to explain the emergence of an apparent car going in reverse direction. And the word "apparent" here is very relevant, in my opinion. Similarly, it's atoms that explain the behaviour of people, or will, presumably, some day.
But people do not explain the behaviour of atoms... Unless... Wait a minute. Is that what you mean? Theories are emergent in people's minds? So people, by forming concepts in their minds, are trapped kind of in a circle. Is it the atoms that explain your mind, or is it your mind that explains the atoms because they are actually a concept in your mind? Is that what you mean?
I'm not saying I agree. I would have to think about it, but, is that what you mean? Or does it go somewhere in the direction that you mean?
Especially from your last arguments with MigL, I think something like that is related with our lack of agreement here. The reason for our discrepancies, I think, is that while you do not accept reductionism, I think @MigL, @iNow, (I'm not so sure about @Ghideon, @Prometheus and @vexspits,...) and I are reductionists.

Yeah, I was thinking for a while about writing the solution with all the information you didn't write and I didn't know about.
But then I thought: "probably Hodja is working on this already from some sector of the noosphere, and will guess the missing parameters."
It seems I was right.
Hats off to Hodja!!!

I agree with StringJunky. I will just try to add other aspects after him.
You've done nothing to deserve people being hard on you, as far as I can see.
The particles are not destroyed after your body burns; they just change chemical state. Your iron will still be iron; your sulfur, sulfur; your magnesium, magnesium. They'll change the oxidation state and keep going. They're going to feed somebody else, that's all. Maybe a plant.
Speculating about the afterlife may be perfectly valid, but it's not a subject of science. "Theory" is also one of the most widely misunderstood terms in science.
One last thing. I think this question belongs in philosophy. As the afterlife is not a topic of biology.
Be optimistic, @Sorrow. Nature takes care of everything, even if our tiny, fatty, bloody, watery brain can't understand it.

I don't understand it either. Seems like you want to compare the reducing power of hydrogen versus energy released by 235U in fission... [?]
I agree with Strange in everything I can think of +1.
Another way is seeing it is by scaling/dimensional arguments. Nuclear rearrangements typically are 103 = 1000 times more energetic than electron rearrangements. That's about the ratio mp/me, which is the order of 2000.

You can also introduce entropy axiomatically from statistical mechanics. From that approach temperature is more of a derived concept and entropy has a very intuitive meaning.
I always hated the Carnot approach, @studiot. I'm very interested in the method that you suggest.

OK. It took me a while to realize what you were trying to do (plus I've been busy.) I was missing some words and/or some data in the statement of your problem. I should have noticed that there must be a reason that you were given the volumes. For some reason I thought you were given the concentrations at equilibrium.
It was a neutralization of two solutions with hydrolysis of the salt with initial concentrations and volumes specified, and you were given the k_a of the weak acid, right? I didn't know that.
It seems you've solved it. I haven't checked the numbers in the quadratic eq. for the moles in equilibrium, but the method is correct. Plus it should give you a pH slightly above 7, so everything checks AFAICT.

Why? Something wrong with the logarithm?
I may be getting this totally wrong, but what's the problem with [acid]=[base] and Henderson-Hasselbach?
Most people are concerned with the murder of George Floyd now, which is only fair. So it seems that you're stuck with me, the chemical idiot of the lot.
So, what's wrong with it?

Why? Something wrong with the logarithm?
I may be missing something. Please, wait for the experts, I'm not one. In the meantime, maybe we both get lucky and you can find the key to your problem with my help, by discussing the basic concepts. If not, I'm sorry if I lead you into more confusion. I'm answering this because nobody else is reacting to your post so far and you seem to be in a bit of a hurry.
Good luck!
I meant "titration."

OK. I'm a bit hazy on this right now. But I think the key words you're looking for are Henderson-Hasselbach. Try to work it out, and if I'm not helping, maybe someone can provide better help. You must picture the tritation curve in your mind. It's what biologists call a sigmoid curve.

Yes, that's right. Time reversal in the equations of motion for a falling object just make it look like an escaping object by reversing the initial conditions for velocity. While the force term remains the same.
Everything? I also think an invitation proffered to Leonard Susskind to the forum to give him a chance to actually say what he would actually say is in order.

Well, white is a charge. It's what in QCD plays the role of zero charge in electrodynamics. The complication with QCD, if you wish, is that there are more ways to obtain zero charge: red-antired, green-antigreen, blue-antiblue, red-green-blue, antired-antigreen-antiblue, and more complicated but higher order combinations.
As Swansont said, color-anticolor are mesons (lighter particles that decay very quickly,) and RGB things are baryons (heavier particles like proton and neutron, some stable, some ephemeral.)
OK. Let's call anti-something by crossing them out. Like G would be anti-green.
You could hit a nucleus with something hard, like an energetic proton, or a meson, and kick off some GBR piece from it. But it wouldn't last long in that colored state. What remains in the nucleus (because the nucleus is white) would be anti-GBR = RR. They would start pulling from each other like crazy, so you would generate a lot of energy in gluon lines going from one to the other trying to "equilibrate the color imbalance" let's say (I'm not being very precise,) up to the point that antiparticle pairs would appear "closing the lines," and turning the colored particles that escape into white particles again.
I can't find a useful diagram for you to picture it. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe someone can provide it.
The whole thing is even more complicated, because these colors are quantum numbers, so they're not even determined. They're constantly rotating in a space with three references R, G, B, but never quite being pure R, G or B. It's sort of like a dynamical rotation in the color space. Again, very imprecise, but I'm trying to explain as best I can.
Swansont is totally right. A single quark would have to choose one color. But then again there are no "single quarks." Quarks in nucleons (protons and neutrons) are constantly rotating their colors by exchanging gluons, which are exchanging their colors among them!!! QCD is totally crazily complicated. Highly non-linear, which means even the interaction particles interact with each other. How do they do it? with other gluons that also interact with each other...
Only quarks I can think of that were flying about with single colors must have been those that were doing so when the universe had a temperature TQCD (a very very high temperature.)
It's crazily, crazily complicated. I hope it's clear that QCD colors are nothing like the ordinary concept of color!!!

AAMOF, you're totally right. I was imprecise to the point of being incorrect with "mix." It was a really bad word choice. You can mix them, yes. Gravity cannot escape the quantum nature, of course. I should have said gravity cannot be formulated as a quantum theory.
A 3-body problem in which one of them is a photon is very simple. Even though with high speeds you must be careful, the photon wouldn't be very difficult to deal with. It's a 2-body Newtonian problem (which has an exact solution) plus a photon moving about. You can totally ignore the effect of the photon on the planets (I suppose you're assuming astronomical objects) and you could get fine details about the effects of the planets on the photon, which would be very small anyway.

Don't be sorry. It's OK. Confined particles are always white, yes. Well, quarks are perpetually changing color, with their gluons. It's not that confined particles are always white, it's more that aggregates of colored particles are always combine to white, and if you want to kick off a colored particle, it splits into white combinations again by creating particle-antiparticle pairs.
It's the charges that balance out (or cancel out,) not the energies. Energies of quarks and gluons add up to the mass of the proton, neutron, etc.
Exactly. If a particle is at x, there's no reason for it not to be somewhere else some time later.
Charge is different. If a particle is white, it keeps being white or decays into red-antired, e.g. But then the products of decay immediately turn white again (because of confinement.) But you cannot have a particle with 1 unit of red charge turn into 2 red charge one second later.
There are more differences. So that's why I told you not to take the analogy too seriously. In fact, there's no analogy at all. "Color" is just a name for a type of charge.
You're very welcome. There's no reason why you can't get a reasonable understanding of QCD by reading popular science books or even some excellent books with some mathematics.

The resultant gravity field is the sum of the fields in Newtonian gravity, both for force fields or for potentials (superposition principle for Newtonian gravity.) It's a good approximation if the fields are not very strong. "Very strong" means that the Newtonian potential divided by c2 is << 1. In GR it's much more complicated (strong fields.) But even in the Newtonian case the resultant gravity field doesn't really solve the problem of motion if the three masses are comparable, as you are in the 3-body problem, which can only be approached numerically or perturbatively (by calculating incremental approximations from a simple particular solutions.) The reason is that any of the three bodies interact with the other two, and the equations cannot be separated.
I'm not sure I'm answering your question, I'm trying incremental approximations to your question.
I hope it adds something significant.
I forgot: Mixing quantum mechanics and gravity is not possible as of today. Some people (Beckenstein, Hawking) have successfully combined both to do calculations, but it doesn't generalize very easily at all. Plus gravity generally is negligible in the very small world.

There are three colors in quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Colors don't cancel each other out. They cancel RGB = colorless. Or RG = anti-B, GB = anti-R, BR = anti-G. All observed QCD particles are colorless.
Don't take the analogy too seriously. Frequencies of light are a continuum, while QCD "colors" are discrete observables. To make it even more puzzling, you can't actually observe them directly, due to confinement. Plus there is no simple "anti-red" fotons, while there are anti-red gluons in some sense
x, y, z are very different from color charge. Charges are internal (non-space time) and conserved. x, y, z are not conserved.
You can't word physics and make sense of it with poetic phrases. Especially quantum physics. You need higher mathematics. And very sophisticated experiments on the other side. There's no way around it. E.g., energy is not "a point," it's an abstract quantity that we define when systems don't single out any particular time (are time-symmetric.) Experiments take care of checking that our definitions, deductions, and inductions are correct.
I applaud your enthusiasm to try to understand it all, but it's more complicated, and subtle, but equally mysterious and wonderful, or even more, than you try to suggest.
I hope I don't bother you or diminish your enthusiasm about physics. Physics is really wonderful and helps you understand a lot about the world around you. But it takes time, dedication... Imagination in straight jacket, as Feynman said.
I didn't say anything about spin, because Strange covered that pretty well. I just added some more info about QCD.

@Eise Now I really understand what you meant when you said,
Let me ask you something. You don't think the Libet experiment settles the question, which I quite agree with. So here's my question:
Is there any way you can conceive of that could settle it? Experimentally, I mean.
Because otherwise, my next question will be: How is all this we've been discussing here in any way different from a battle of words?

I will just ignore all your contents, provided you eventually manage to find any. It's more... economic. I have no time for deliberate, self-indulging, obscenely pointless, and painstakingly --if ridiculously unskillfully-- worded idiocy.
There's plenty of room for narcissistic lunacy on the internet. What brings you to this place of discussion and honest communication of evidence, make no mistake, is no mystery to most people here. Most, from what I'm starting to learn, are quite used to reasoning things out, self-informing/correcting and respectfully informing/correcting each other. You're pretty obvious to everybody. It's like entering a room where you're the only one naked.
Put your clothes on!